AVRE Industries Launches 100 Battledress Blouses with Normandy Parachute Silk

AVRE Industries has released a bespoke reproduction of the 1940 Pattern Battledress blouse, lined at the collar with silk cut from a genuine Allied parachute manufactured for, and used in, the Normandy invasion. The parachute survived more than eighty years in preservation. Rather than return it to storage, the company — co-founded by historians Al Murray and James Holland — has cut it into 100 collars, and stopped there. When the silk runs out, the edition closes. The wool tells the same story from the other direction. The blouse is cut from 100% Merino sourced from the West Yorkshire mill that invented the British Army's khaki cloth and supplied it through the war — an unbroken 240-year line still weaving in the same county. The construction is deliberately the officer's route rather than the quartermaster's. In the 1940s, officers who cared about how they looked took their issue kit to a tailor, choosing their own cloth and lining; those garments became known as the Officer's Cut. AVRE follows it exactly, inviting each buyer to a one-to-one fitting in London, or sending measuring instructions to those who can't come. Everything else stays faithful to the original: two pleated chest pockets, epaulettes, an adjustable waist belt, and the distinctive cropped cut that sits high on the waist — a detail designed so the blouse wouldn't bunch when a man was seated in a vehicle or crawling prone. Each of the 100 is hand-numbered and signed by Murray and Holland. They're made in Greenwich, south-east London, where every AVRE garment is produced. £1,595, tailored to the individual, non-refundable because no two are the same. James Holland, co-founder "Somebody will say we should have left it in a box, and I understand that. But a parachute in a box teaches nobody anything. The generation who jumped with these things cut them up for wedding dresses and christening gowns the moment the war ended — they'd find the idea of a sacred parachute quite funny. This silk did the most extraordinary thing a piece of cloth can do, and now a hundred people will carry a bit of it around and be asked about it. That's how memory survives."